Among countries in South East Asia, Singapore is perhaps the only country that Malaysians often argue with when it comes to origin of food as well as who has the best of certain dishes. Truth is, while a lot of famous “Singaporean dishes” probably originated from Malaysia, our southern neighbors do have quite a lot of original food worth sampling.
Teow Chew pork noodle – pork ball, meat, and liver
The day after the first ever Nuffnang Awards, instead of following the tour, we decided to head to Ponggol Nasi Lemak Center at Upper Serangoon Street to try the pork noodle for brunch. According to Cheng Leong, this is the absolute must have whenever he comes to Singapore.
Though being in one of the only two professions that can legally lie, we trust Cheng Leong the lawyer when it comes to food.
Ponggol Nasi Lemak Centre
Ponggol Nasi Lemak Centre is just a short walk from NE13 Kovan station. The smallish hawker center houses over half a dozen stalls with at least a few operating around the clock. We ordered from AMK House of Teochew Noodles that operates 24 hours a day.
The stall offers a few dishes, but everyone ended up ordering the same dried version of Teow Chew pork noodle for $3 a bowl.
Haze, KY, FA, Gareth, Kim, and Cheng Leong
The dish is basically similar to wantan noodle but with a healthy dosage of pork meat, a few pork balls, liver (if you prefer), mushroom, some vegetables, and plenty of deep fried shallots in a vinegar based sauce with a bowl of soup at the side and some red chili padi as condiment.
Even with a heavy dose of skepticism at first, the pork noodle turned out to be really nice. It’s a combination of taste that I never really had before, and I really liked the sauce that works not unlike the experience you get from having xiao long bao with vinegar. It was very tasty.
If you’re around Singapore, this would be a decent place to eat. I’ve read that the nasi lemak is pretty good too.
Address:
Ponggol Nasi Lemak Centre
965 Upper Serangoon Rd,
Singapore, 534721,Singapore
GPS: 1.361822,103.886611
Tel: 6281 0020
The must-have applications on BB 8520
For those who just bought their Blackberry 8520 from Xpax and are new to Blackberry, here’s a few applications that I consider a must have. These are the software I advised every BB users to install, and they are all free (as in free beer type of free)
1. UberTwitter
This is of course, a must have for anyone with a twitter account. Twitterberry might have a cooler name, but UberTwitter absolutely pawns in terms of functionality and user friendliness. It supports basically everything twitter has to offer, including picture upload, geo tagging (with cell towers or GPS), RT, reply all, DM, etc etc.
2. Opera Mini
While the Blackberry built in browser is pretty decent, Opera Mini offers a much better user interface in web surfing. The browser also goes through a proxy that compresses and reduced image size for faster downloading. Other than that, the wealth of short cut keys make web browsing a much simpler affair with less fiddling on the trackpad/trackball
3. BBM version 5.0
The BBM version 4.6 that comes with Blackberry 8520 is perfectly usable, but the upgraded version offers a better user interface, ability to add display picture, and also the very interesting Blackberry Group that allows calendar, task, and file sharing capabilities.
4. Google Apps
Google Map, Gmail, Google Latitute, Google News, Google Readers and more are available for your BB 8520.
5. Blackberry App World
For everything else, there’s the Blackberry App World.
I remember buying a compilation cassette sometimes back in 1996, it had a brown cover with the title “Alternative Rock” smeared across in red. This was the cassette that introduced me to songs like Girl from Mars by Ash, You Oughta Know by Alanis Morissette , and Good by Better than Ezra.
But the one song from the compilation that made the biggest impression was Oasis’s Wonderwall. It was a song that struck everything in the right cord, with lyrics that Brandon Flowers of The Killers can only dream of writing. From then on I picked up songs like Don’t Look Back in Anger and Champaign Supernova, and Oasis became an integral part of my play list.
Our tickets to rock!
So when Gareth told me about Oasis coming to Singapore for a concert a few weeks ago, I replied “Lets make it happen!” without thinking twice.
For rock concerts, I never settle for anything less than the grand stand tickets. We managed to con Kim & Horny to each also fork up $98 SGD for a ticket (to fill up a car, you know, save money!) to the concert even though Horny didn’t actually know who is Liam or Noel. Amanda was a late addition to the road trip cos she was just too crazy over Oasis; plus, her relatively small size means that she fits in the center of the backseats.
chicken rice balls were yummy!
So last Sunday we departed from KL just before noon and decided to get our lunch (without any breakfast/brunch) at of Melaka, which also make a nice half way rest stop for the long journey.
We had an over fulfilling meal of chicken rice balls at Hoe Kee, and then stuffed ourselves with a bowl of cendol at Jonker88.
Which was all nice and dandy until we drove by this pohpiah stall and had to just cry in agony cos we were too full to even have a bite. Very tragic!
Subway with pork ham and pork bacon!
By the time we hit the road again it was around 2:30pm, we needed to collect tickets by 7pm for the 8pm concert. We thought we had plenty of time.
We didn’t factor in the stupidly inconsiderate drivers at Johor. It seems like the only way to overtake is via the left lane. The kiasu factor of those drivers really got into our nerves.
Alas, we got to the immigration at around 6pm, and forgot to bring along any immigration cards… So we had to go to the immigration office and witness the inefficiencies that infect even the Singaporean officers. It was a long an excruciating 45-minute (I had to call to make sure we could redeem our tickets past 7pm) process before we got out of there.
we were at the front with the crowd, and Liam being a badass
With the help of Gareth’s little portable Garmin GPS unit, we finally arrived at the Singapore National Stadium at 7:30 or so. Got our tickets and went to Subway for some pork sandwich goodness. By the time we got into the hall it was around 8:15.
Then Oasis came out and it was completely awesome!
pic taken without any zooming, that’s how close we were!
While the other two old men hang out at the side, Kim, Amanda and I made our way to the front of the crowd and managed to get ourselves about 4-5 rows back from the stage. The atmosphere was electric, and the crowd was crazy. Lotsa squeezing and pushing but generally everyone was just having blast.
At one particular point a dude with mohawk started dancing like a maniac and hit a lot of ppl within 2 feet of him. A burly dude grabbed his body and I sorta helped flip his legs up, and the dude got body surfed all the way to the back. We high five-ed 
Wonderwall!
With the last bit of GPS juice (car charger died) we managed to find our way back to the Johor border after the concert. By the time we got back to KL it was more than 3am already. We stayed in Singapore for a total of less than 5 hours. My shortest trip yet.
Next trip would be Melbourne to see Mell for a week. Can’t wait!
Last weekend I went to Singapore for the 2nd time in a month, and instead of being on a mission to do Malaysia proud like the last one, this trip is all about having fun. I went to the V-Post Nuffnang Christmas Bash thanks to the invitation from Nuffnang. Chartered bus, hotel room at Marriot, party with a bunch of bloggers from both sides fo the straits, all expense paid. What more can I ask for?
The costume party has a pretty, er.. unique theme. We’re each assigned a letter V, P, O, S, or T and are supposed to dress up as something corresponding to the letter. For example, in the picture below you see Jolyn as Tape mesure / Tailor, Vivien as Student, and Ginni as Playboy Bunny. I was the Potong Stim Pirate with very minimal effort spent in fixing up my so called costume.
Jolyn, Vivien, and Ginni in the taxi on the way to the party
The other traveling bloggers include Suan as a Trekker, Huai Bin as Osama (who changed his letter to P, as I shall explain later), FA as the Shopaholic, Eiling the Vampire, Cindy as Venus, Audrey the Virgin Bride, and Ninie as probably another Vampire.
party people at the place to be
The party was hosted at DXO, which was quite a distance (in Singaporean term) from the hotel. Now one thing about this city-state I can do without is the 2,500 traffic lights you have to go through to get anywhere.
Outside the club Nuffies such as Tim, Nicholas, Pinky, Firdy, Yee Hou, Robb, and Ming were already waiting. Curiously, I also met Mike Yip, who seems to appear in every event regardless of location or organizer. Kenny was lurking around as an old man as well.
myself and Jolyn, the old man who’s hairy and bald at the same time
The whole place was rather packed with people and with the MC, Randall, running the show. There were several games and prizes to be won, and I walked away with an Osim pace counter after being the first one to name all the Nuffies in order of their letter to spell out the word NUFFNANG.
Audrey won the best costume with Cindy as runner up, and Mike Yip got a pair of tickets to Manila as the first prize in lucky draw too. I guess we didn’t do too bad at all.
While the party was pretty eventful, I thought it’ll be nicer if we were given more actual party time to dance and shake what our mamas gave us. However, there were only myself and a few other fellow Malaysians doing that during the limited party time given.
Audrey sleeping like an apek, and Huai Bin missing out the party
Overall it was still a very fun trip, we managed to catch up with a few buddies and met quite a few new friends at the same time. In the last picture collage you can see how Audrey doesn’t sleep like a Virgin Bride, and the only picture I snapped at the party, of Huai Bin missing out 75% of the event. So Huai Bin’s P stands for PASSED OUT
Next up would of course, be the fifth installment of X’mas Eve Party at home! See you!
I went to Singapore for a couple days, my first time there in the last 13 years. A short trip for an interesting event, a competition organized by Brand’s that we eventually came up first… running up (which involved only two teams.)
Details of the trip shall come soon, but first, I want to also make you envy by showing you this little toy David sent me a day prior to the Singapore trip for review. A Nokia XpressMusic 5800!
Nokia XpressMusic 5800
The phone actually exceed my expectations, very polished touch enabled user interface. Still a few bugs to iron out prior to the full release I bet. Full review on this blog soon, stay tuned.
Singapore MRT
Singapore MRT is a lot busier than I remember, and commuters don’t seem to line up nor actually let passengers get down first prior to barging into the train. I thought that was a little surprising.
Brand’s bloggeer’s challenge
The Malaysian team did not win (sorry folks!), but Red Diva, KK, Suanie, Sultan Muzaffar, and I did try our best. It was a pretty close call. More on the event on this blog soon.
Brewerks at Singapore
Suan brought me to Brewerks, a microbrewery along the Singapore river. Good beer, good company, but my alcohol tolerance is still tragically low.
this reminds me of the Rainbow bridge in Tokyo
The scenery at Clark Quay at night is very nice. The photo above is what you can see from Brewerks. Strangely there are quite a few people jogging along the riverside at 9pm, and they’re almost all whites. We’re still deciding if they were exercising or showing off.
Singapore River at night
The river cruise looks like something I might want to try in my future visit, Sheryl and I had a pretty good riverboat tour back when we were in Chicago a number of years ago when we were both very much together in the States.
